mathewingram.com/work

There are a few different threads weaving through the blogosphere related to the evolution of media — not just TV but all different kinds of content. One thread is the Bear Stearns report by Spencer Wang, in which he looks at how the TV content business is changing, and the rise of “user-generated content.” You can tune into a conference call, or scroll through a PDF version of his presentation on what Om Malik calls the “fat belly” of the Long Tail.

One of the interesting points to me was that 75 per cent of the top 20 videos on YouTube on one particular day were “user-generated content” of some kind, which goes against the standard argument from people like Mark Cuban and Nick Carr that the majority of popular videos on YouTube and other sites are copyright violations. As Rafat Ali at PaidContent succinctly puts it, the point of the presentation is that “aggregation and context” are the key.

That leads to another thread, which came up while reading Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, where he pointed to a new Christmas gadget-shopping hub put together by Federated Media and Best Buy. The site has gadget reviews written by bloggers for half a dozen different websites, including Uncrate, Oh Gizmo, Gadgetopia and PVR Blog. It’s not clear whether the reviews were written specifically for the site, or are taken from the participating blogs, but it’s a pretty smart idea.

Then there’s the New York Times story about Philips sponsoring the entire newscast of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Obviously that isn’t new media, but it’s an interesting move by Philips to cut through the clutter of TV advertising, as Techdirt notes — just as Best Buy is trying to cut through the clutter of Web advertising. In other words, aggregation and context.

So the Second Life avatar known as Anshe Chung — whose real-world equivalent is known as Ailin Graef — has issued a press release saying she has become the virtual world’s first millionaire, after accumulating property and other assets (custom avatar design, etc.) that are allegedly worth a million dollars, if they were converted from Linden dollars into real U.S. money. Valleywag is skeptical, to say the least.

As Valleywag editor Nick Denton put it in an earlier skeptical post, “Let’s be generous, and assume that the net worth estimate isn’t an outright lie; nevertheless, if Chung’s owner ever decided to liquidate those assets, their speculative value would evaporate. They have as much value as a large holding in a mafia-pumped penny stock.” He then goes on to criticize the gullible media for believing such tales.

Of course, Nick — a former journalist with the Financial Times — must be aware that such credulity is hardly confined to reporting about virtual worlds. As more than one person has noted, reporting about rich celebrities such as Donald Trump is equally filled with hot air and credulous reporting, even from usually reliable sources such as Forbes magazine. All kinds of vague numbers are floated around about Trump’s net worth, which is almost certainly orders of magnitude smaller than he says it is.

The fact that liquidating all those assets in Second Life would demolish their alleged value is no less true when it comes to the net worth of Larry Page or Sergey Brin, for that matter. They couldn’t sell more than a fraction of the stock that makes up their net worth without cratering the share price. Of course, they can borrow against those holdings — something that, for now at least, Ms. Chung (or Graef) cannot do. More articles about her virtual empire here, and here.

In what amounts to a “dog bites man” sort of story, the BBC is reporting that online video is eating into TV watching, according to a recent survey. Gee, ya think? For every sign that building relationships with viewers online increases their loyalty to a particular show — which CBS said recently appears to be the case with some of the shows that it has released into the wild on the Internet — there are signs that overall TV viewership levels continue to decline.

What’s also happening, of course, is that any TV watching that is going on is happening very differently. I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had over the last little while with people who not only don’t watch as much TV as they used to, but watch it primarily with the use of a PVR, whenever they want to, and without commercials. All of this requires that TV networks and advertisers think about what they are doing in different ways, as Mike Urlocker points out on his blog.

TV still exists, obviously, and many people continue to like sitting around in groups watching “appointment television” shows like Survivor or Gilmore Girls or whatever (for me it’s Heroes). But it is also increasingly being sliced and diced and served up in a myriad of ways online, through YouTube and Revver and through the websites of the networks. More and more people are watching bits and pieces of shows instead of the whole thing. And as David Brazeal notes, quality doesn’t matter as much as we might like to think it does.

In other words, TV isn’t dying but evolving. What is it evolving into? Who knows. But the TV and the Internet are effectively becoming one thing, just as the Internet and the telephone are becoming one thing, and just as the Internet and the computer are increasingly becoming one thing. George Nimeh has some worthwhile thoughts on the subject too, and my friend Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 wonders whether all this evolution is really just the video content business eating itself alive. Ian Delaney at TwoPointOuch has also written about it.

Looks like the American Marketing Association has its eye on social networks like MySpace as the shopping malls of the Web era. The AMA came out with a survey on Friday that said 47 per cent of people would go to such sites to research Christmas gifts — and better still, 29 per cent said they would buy things there if they could. You could almost hear the “cha-ching” while reading the story.

This idea has been commented on already by (among others) Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life and Pete Cashmore at Mashable. As Froosh points out at HipMojo, News Corp. has been looking for ways to “monetize” MySpace ever since they paid more than half a billion dollars for it. But how best to do it? Not everyone is crazy about the idea of Wendy’s and Burger King setting up profiles for their advertising characters, and it’s hard to blame them.

So how to integrate selling things with something like MySpace — or even just regular blogs, for that matter. As Pete has mentioned, there are plenty of companies trying to solve that problem, including MyPickList.com or “social shopping” sites like Crowdstorm, Wists, ThisNext and others. But the one I think has the most potential, although it doesn’t get written about a lot, is Goodstorm and its “MeCommerce” service, which is still in early beta.

In effect, it’s a sidebar shopping widget that allows blog readers to click and buy things without ever leaving the sidebar. It needs some work, but it’s an appealing idea — click to select a book or T-shirt or DVD, then click and enter your details, then click to buy it. And 50 per cent of the revenue goes to the site that hosts the widget. Goodstorm recently launched an API developers’ contest to see what kinds of widgets people could come up with.

My friend and fellow mesh organizer Rob Hyndman told me recently about a great project that recently got under way in Toronto — courtesy of Mark Dowds and the team at Creation Step (who helped us out with the first mesh conference), along with some other like-minded individuals in the Toronto tech sphere, such as noted troublemaker and DemoCamp organizer David Crow.

The project is called Indoor Playground and it involves turning the 5th floor of an old brick loft building in downtown Toronto (Richmond and Peter) into a kind of work and meeting place for startups, people with ideas, people from out of town and so on, with some individual work areas and a couple of large common rooms and social spaces. Mark’s blog post introducing the project is here.

There’s a community forum set up at Ning, where people can sign up to contribute ideas and follow the development of the site, which is still being renovated (there’s a photo gallery at the forum page). Mark says he wants to officially launch the Indoor Playground in January. I think it’s a great idea.

Update:

David mentions another co-working venture that’s starting up in Toronto in February, called The Commons Cafe.

Michael Geist, one of Canada’s leading commentators when it comes to intellectual property and the Internet, opened up a bit of a hornet’s nest with his recent post supporting the decision by major ISP’s to back the cybertip blacklist on child exploitation and pornography. Project Cleanfeed Canada is based on a similar initiative in the UK that was led by British Telecom, and is expected to be rolled out over the next few months.

Michael said that the project was likely to “generate several responses, notably concerns about censorship and fears that this could extend to other forms of content,” but said that in his opinion “while some skepticism is understandable… cybertip.ca will implement an appeal process for content providers who believe that their content is wrongly blocked.” In the end, he said, “the arrival of Project Cleanfeed in Canada looks like a good news story that merits close monitoring.”

Several critics immediately took issue with Michael’s support, however, including Engtech — who said that “the idea of having a national blacklist sends shivers down my spine. I would always prefer that illegal websites be shutdown rather than putting into power national filters that have the potential to be abused. I’m a pessimist, I believe that any form of censorship will eventually be abused despite its good intentions.” Engtech points to a good overview of the issues here.

Michael also got a long critical comment on his post from Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing, who until recently worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Michael, I think that you’re being entirely too sanguine about a secret blacklist of content. Having had my own material censored by such blacklists at the national and local level, I’m a lot less trusting of these systems. The idea is fundamentally broken.

First of all, it seems to me that keeping a secret list of “evil” content is inherently subject to abuse. This is certainly something we’ve seen in every single other instance of secret blacklisting.

Cory and other critics say their concerns are that a) those who search out child porn would not be deterred by the blacklist, b) that many legitimate sites might be inadvertently caught in such a net, and c) that keeping the entire process secret is offensive and prone to abuse. Michael’s response (and I’m paraphrasing here) is that while some people might be able to get around the blacklist, preventing access to child porn is important enough that the effort is still worth it.

I have to admit that, despite being the father of three daughters and as concerned as anyone about access to child porn, like Engtech and Cory I see the weaknesses of the cybertip project — including the secrecy and the potential for abuse — as outweighing the potential benefits of preventing inadvertent exposure to questionable websites. In that sense, it seems to be (as one commenter put it) “like using ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) to kill a fly.”

For my “Ingram 2.0” column last week, I wrote about a Toronto-based social-networking startup called PikSpot that is designed to help create communities of interest, and has launched with two groups based on Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo’s UndoTV and Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics. I thought I would reproduce the piece here for those who might have missed it.

When it comes to Web-related ventures, Scott Waddell is not your typical twenty-something, working on a MySpace clone while doing his undergrad degree — in fact, he’s pretty close to being a veteran. He was involved in several early Internet companies in the mid- and late-1990s, including iRover, a content-management system for Internet service providers. He also helped pioneer the use of streaming video for sites like Accuweather and MSN, long before YouTube came along.

Mr. Waddell’s latest venture, with partner Geoff Norton, is called PikSpot.com, a social-networking hub that can be used by groups, companies or individuals as the engine behind their community. While “Web 2.0” sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and so on tend to be focused on the type of content that users are sharing — Flickr for photos, YouTube for video, MySpace for blogs, etc. — PikSpot is designed to handle all of those, but is more focused on helping to create communities, regardless of what kinds of content are involved.

“PikSpot is all about collecting, organizing and promoting user-generated content,” Mr. Waddell said. “It’s designed to create niche communities based around shared interests — whether that’s funny videos or knitting or cars — and letting people publish and share their content with others in an organized kind of way.”

Kim Robinson, an investor who is also chairman of PikSpot’s parent company Wired Kingdom, says the site helps turn the “Wild West of the Web into a more organized set of collaborative communities,” one that even companies wouldn’t hesitate to use for internal communication and teamwork.

Continue reading “PikSpot wants to help tame the Wild West”

My friend and fellow mesh organizer — and all-around smart guy — Stuart MacDonald has a great blog post up today on the end of Web 2.0. But don’t get depressed, all you fans of blogs and podcasts and wikis and social media. All Stuart means is that Web 2.0 as a hot new concept (albeit one that tends to be poorly defined) is over, and what we’re seeing is the start of Web 2.0 as something that can really mean something to the general populace.

In other words, instead of just being something cool that goes “ping,” all the things that we associate with Web 2.0 are becoming part of how people use the Web, whether they realize it or not. People are reading and commenting on blogs and using social media and those kinds of tools without knowing that they are doing something Web 2.0 — and that’s a good thing. That’s why mesh is called Canada’s Web conference, and not Canada’s Web 2.0 conference (no, it’s not because O’Reilly sent us a C&D letter).

Remember when every company sent out press releases to say that they had a website? Those days are gone (thankfully), and now the Internet is something millions of people use without ever really thinking about it. And it’s no wonder that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the guy we have to thank for the Web, got a little testy in an interview awhile back when asked about Web 2.0. There is no Web 2.0, he said — there’s just the evolution of the Web. All that interactivity (and more) is something he envisioned in the first place. It’s just taken us awhile to get there.

Anyone who attended the ridiculously successful mesh meetup on November 15th (blog post is here) at the Irish Embassy in Toronto may have seen a woman with a small microphone interviewing various luminaries and other assorted folk. As some of you may know by now, that was podcaster extraordinaire Leesa Barnes, and the fruits of her labours are now available for all to enjoy.

That includes interviews with Dr. Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests, blogger Juan Gonzalez of global-culture.org, Norman Young of The Talking Company (which is in stealth mode), new blogger Rob Schaumer and Bernie Aho of Conceptshare.com — and those are just the beginning. There are more to come. Thanks again to Leesa for all her hard work, and also for the compliments she bestowed on all of us in a recent post she wrote about mesh.

Podcasts were produced by Leesa’s company Caprica Interactive Marketing, with music from the Podsafe Music Network by Uncle Seth.

Here are the podcasts:

1. Juan Gonzalez

Juan talks to Leesa about:

• Ways in which your online conversations can help you meet people in different countries
• Why Juan left Mexico to settle in Canada (and it wasn’t because of money)
• How to talk with your hands using your blog

2. Norman Young of The Talking Company

Norman talks to Leesa about:

• An idea Norman has for Mesh ’07
• How to handle the misconceptions that mainstream audiences have over the word podcast (or should it be netcast?)
• Why the interactive space will never take the place of the physical space (the Mesh meetup is a perfect example)

3. new blogger Rob Schaumer

Rob talks to Leesa about:

• His big challenge is and whether or not he can do it
• What he hopes to learn when he attends Mesh ’07
• His 3 tips for staying young
• Advice on what to do if you’re interviewing someone really boring

4. Dr. Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests

Tony talks to Leesa about:

• Whether Mathew Ingram looks better in person than he does online
• What Web 2.0 means
• Why he is excited about Mesh ’07

5. Bernie Aho of Conceptshare

Bernie talks to Leesa about:

• Why ConceptShare.com decided not to set up shop in Silicon Valley and chose Toronto instead
• How ConceptShare.com is building buzz without spending enormous sums on advertising
• How their biggest frustration sharing visual concepts over email turned into a business idea
• Web 2.0? It’s now time for Web 3.0
• Why Bernie would be part of the Mesh organizing team
• Which is colder – Sudbury or Toronto? Bernie settles the debate once and for all

On the so-called Lenox Globe, one of the oldest known maps from the 15th century, there was a Latin inscription on one unexplored region that said “Here Be Dragons.” Maybe the CBC should have inscribed that over the stage door leading to their venture capital reality show The Dragons’ Den. A Toronto startup called JobLoft certainly got chewed up during the filming of the show — although there is some debate about who did the chewing, and whether they deserved it or not.

As Rick Spence outlines on his blog, the JobLoft guys got a $200,000 cheque from the four venture capital “dragons” — and a commitment that they would get lots of great advice and assistance — in return for 50 per cent of their company. On the final episode of the show last night, however, the company’s advisor (a professor from Ryerson) criticized the dragons and their offer, and the dragons tore up the cheque. Ryan Coleman of Clay Tablet has a video clip and some thoughts about the show.

A couple of things strike me about this situation. The first is that while all this makes for great TV, I’m not sure it’s a great way to raise money. In other words, it’s a sideshow. Just as going on Who Wants to Date a Millionaire isn’t a great way to find true love, Dragons’ Den probably isn’t a great way to find a good VC match. The JobLoft guys say on their blog that they’re glad of the experience and that it got them publicity, but in the long run I’m not sure that it was worth it.

A lot of people in the comments at JobLoft’s blog take them to task for blowing the deal, and argue that their advisor was wrong to confront the dragons, etc. Waiting until the last minute to raise concerns is certainly not a great approach — and I would agree with Kempton that the insults that their teacher lobbed at the dragons were also totally offside in my opinion — but at the same time the JobLoft guys note that they got very little face-time or input from the dragons, contrary to what was promised.

In the end, it’s also worth noting that $200,000 for half of your company seems to me like selling yourself pretty short (as Toronto entrepreneur Austin Hill noted in this excellent post on the show). Maybe it’s just as well they got out of it. Ben Yoskovitz has some thoughts too.

Not content to let the gigantic egos of Jason Calacanis (ex of Netscape) and Nick Denton (former and current editor of Valleywag) battle it out alone, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington decided to wade into the fray with a post on the recent back-and-forth posts by J.C. and N.D. For what it’s worth, Mikey seems to be siding with Jason rather than Nick.

As my friend Rob Hyndman points out, this is all very High School 2.0. And it’s obvious from reading the comments at TechCrunch that even some fans of Mike’s think talking about the bitchy posts by Denton and Calacanis is beneath him. “I thought this was TechCrunch, not DaysOfOurLivesCrunch,” says one. Another suggested the post belonged on Mike’s personal blog, CrunchNotes, “if that.”

As I said in the comments on Rob’s post, blogs and social media are inherently more personal and more interactive than traditional media — and that personalized nature comes through in many ways. It’s true that you would never see that sort of behaviour in the “old” media (apart from the gossip columns), but that’s because old media is by its nature more impersonal. With a more personalized media, you have to take the good with the bad.

The Scobleizer says that we need both Valleywag to tear things down and TechCrunch to build things up, and then reaches for a somewhat bizarre geological metaphor, with Mike Arrington as the famous Yosemite landmark El Capitan and Jason Calacanis Nick Denton as (I think) a glacier. He’s right though. For better or worse, both TechCrunch and Valleywag have their purposes.

It’s been around for a little while now, but a site called TurnHere sort of escaped my notice until recently, when I ran across a mention of it in two vastly different places (always a sign that I should sit up and pay attention). The first was on video site Beet, which wrote about the service and posted an interview it did with one of its investors, William Randolph Hearst III. Beet also had an interview recently with the founder of TurnHere, Brad Inman, which it linked to in the post as well.

What TurnHere.com is creating is a repository for short films about different locations. It already has hundreds of video tours of everything from Toronto’s Chinatown and Annex to dozens of locations in the San Francisco Bay area, and from Dublin in Ireland to Cabo San Lucas. And it is syndicating the videos through other sites, including — and this is probably the coolest — Google Earth, which has links to the videos embedded at various place marks.

The second place I found a mention of TurnHere was completely serendipitous. I recently got to know Leigh Himel, the CEO of a startup called Oponia Networks (which was co-founded by a friend of mine, Vanessa Williams). And Leigh recently started a blog, in which she mentioned some things about herself — like the fact that her father’s cousin is married to Suzanne Somers. She also mentioned that her brother Dave had appeared in a funny video.

Needless to say, I clicked on the link (like most Web surfers, I can’t pass up a funny video) and was taken to a site that linked to a video from TurnHere, in which Leigh’s brother Dave strolled through Chinatown talking about its various highlights, including his favourite place to get Chinese pork and duck, and then a trip to his Chinese herbalist and acupuncturist. I thought it was terrific — just a regular person giving you a personal view of a place through their eyes.

I haven’t checked out any of the other videos from TurnHere, but if a substantial number of them are as good as the one I watched with Dave touring Chinatown, I think the service is likely to be a hit. And it also shows the increasing penetration of video into our everyday Web lives. Greg Sterling of Screenwerk has also written about TurnHere.

My friend Paul Kedrosky notes that Flickr has introduced something interesting (and here I was writing just a few posts ago that Yahoo hadn’t really done anything since buying the photo site) with its aggregated data on what cameras its registered members use. Paul (and Tim) believe that data is “the new Intel inside,” and that many companies are as valuable for the data they can aggregate — in various interesting ways — as they are for their actual services.

Paul said much the same thing about my fellow mesh organizer Mike McDerment’s company Freshbooks, which does online invoicing and time tracking for companies. Mike and his team recently introduced a feature that will aggregate the data from all of its users (more than 100,000 now) and allow them to benchmark their companies against the rest of their industry, or other industries. Valuable stuff.

Now Flickr will tell you what the hot camera is, and allow you to see which ones are climbing in popularity and which ones are dropping. Yes, it’s true that some of this data might not be correct, for a variety of reasons (as Matt Hurst notes) — and the trends could be distorted if large numbers of people remove their EXIF data before uploading, as some do — but despite those caveats it’s still worth having. And it’s a sign of what other services could do with their data.

It was possible to get the camera data from Flickr before from various places, including this site, which pulled in the EXIF data from uploaded photos, but now Flickr is providing the numbers itself, as well as some nice graphs and charts. And as Shoutblog points out, they have also linked in camera price comparison and shopping via Yahoo Shopping, which is smart.

A couple of stories today came together in my mind as evidence of what you might call Envy 2.0. The first is the New York Times story about how the rich are envious of the super-rich. It seems that Web 1.0 success stories like Reid Hoffman of PayPal (now running LinkedIn) are envious of former colleagues Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube, who are now hundreds of times richer.

What a problem to have, right? I feel sorry for poor old Reid, as I’m sure all of you do too. The article is cited by some people as evidence of a bubble mentality, and it’s hard to argue with that perception. There’s no question that the urge to make a mark, particularly a large financial one, is part of what drives many entrepreneurs — and that’s a good thing in my mind. But when it becomes raw envy, it can make people do stupid things. Nice to see that the Hot or Not guy is trying to take a step back.

The second Envy 2.0 story is the bitch-slap going on between Jason Calacanis — until recently the head of Netscape, and former CEO of blog network Weblogs Inc. — and Nick Denton of competing blog network Gawker Media, who is writing the gossip site Valleywag after the rather sudden departure of former editor Nick Douglas. The match au pissoir got started when Nick wrote about Jason jumping ship because Netscape is cratering.

Not one to take that kind of thing lying down, Jason posted some comments on Valleywag about how Nick’s numbers were all wrong (even though he claimed to have gotten them from Omniture, which would be internal-only, and to have cross-checked them with ComScore), and then posted his own invective about Gawker and how it is getting creamed by sites like TMZ and PerezHilton. And of course Jason used Alexa traffic stats, which are widely viewed as unreliable.

Is Nick envious of Jason for selling Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $35-million $25-million? Maybe. Is Jason envious of Nick for being able to say whatever he thinks and do his own thing, instead of having sold out to The Man and then having to quit? Perhaps. Plenty of envy to go around, it seems.

Muhammad Saleem, a very perceptive blogger who is also a top submitter at Digg and Netscape, has written a post that looks at the problems with “socially-driven” news sites, using as an example a fake news story that someone submitted to Digg about Sony recalling 650,000 PlayStations. The story made it to the front page of the site in only a couple of hours, and stayed there until it was apparently removed. Muhammad sees this as another example of how many people don’t read stories.

He’s right, of course. And there’s no question that the geek-heavy audience at Digg is likely to vote up stories like the PlayStation one regardless of whether it’s true or not — as appears to have happened in this case — just to take some shots at Sony. However, I’d like to point out that fake news routinely makes its way into newspapers and onto TV newscasts as well, and in those cases there are a heck of a lot more checks and balances in the system (theoretically at least) than there are at Digg.

In those cases, the fake news lingers in print and video — and in various databases — long after it has been shown to be wrong, which often gives rise to urban legends about people getting abducted so their organs can be removed, etc. At least in the Digg case, commenters on the story repeatedly pointed out how fake it was. That’s a service social media can offer that traditional media can’t (at least, not yet).

Update:

Muhammad and I have been having a discussion via IM about the fact that Digg appears to have removed the story, not just from the front page but from the site completely. He argues that this is wrong, and that Digg administrators should have removed it from the front page but left the story up and flagged it as inaccurate. As it is, it looks as though the site is trying to pretend that the incident never happened. Tony Hung says that by removing it, Digg is going against its stated principles as a social media site. What do you think?